Houghton will continue Williamson era at TxDOT

It was no surprise that Deirdre Delisi stepped down as Chairwoman of the Texas Transportation Commission to focus on Texas Governor Rick Perry’s presidential campaign. He apparently needs it. However, Perry’s choice to tap Commissioner Ted Houghton to take the helm in Delisi’s place is shocking, yet also not surprising.

Rather than turn a new page and aid the process of getting the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) back on the right footing after heavy criticism of its handling of finances, the Trans Texas Corridor, and the Department’s push for private toll roads, Perry chose an in-your-face Chairman with a history of picking fights with the public (watch this video of him calling concerned citizens ‘bigots’), legislators, and local toll authorities.

TxDOT came under Sunset Review at the peak of the public outcry over the Trans Texas Corridor. At the time the review began, Ric Williamson, very close friend of Perry’s since the time they had served in the legislature together when Perry was a Democrat, was the Chair of the Transportation Commission. He ushered in the era of selling off Texas public roads to private toll operators, actually gallivanting across Europe announcing to key global players that Texas was for sale.

Williamson was Perry’s chief henchman in getting Perry’s legacy building project implemented — the Trans Texas Corridor (TTC), a 1,200 foot wide, 4,000 mile multi-modal network of toll roads, toll rail, telecommunications lines, pipelines, and utilities, snatching up 580,000 acres of private Texas farm and ranch land that would all fall under the control of a foreign company for a half century. The development rights for TTC-35 were awarded to Madrid-based Cintra and San Antonio based Zachry in March of 2005.

A Texas-sized backlash ensued causing the legislature to slap a moratorium on private toll contracts (called Comprehensive Development Agreements/CDAs or public private partnerships/P3s) in May of 2007, but not before Williamson signed off on handing Cintra-Zachry two segments of SH 130 for the first such contract in the state of Texas, delivered in the midst of the monolithic battle going on in the legislature that year. Williamson was in his element when controversy and opposition whirled around him, the more the better.

But even for him, the controversy and stress took its ‘toll,’ Williamson died of a heart attack in December 2007 just as TxDOT was getting ready to launch the second corridor, TTC-69. TxDOT received an unprecedented 28,000 comments against TTC-69. Not long afterwards, the Department revealed it had made a $1.1 billion ‘accounting error’ causing a slew of projects to be put on hold drawing ire from legislators who TxDOT initially blamed for the cancellations, only to find out it was the agency’s fault and they purposely hid the facts from the legislature for three months.

One Senator, Tommy Williams (strangely now the Senate Transportation Committee Chairman and TxDOT’s biggest defender of late), basically quipped at a hearing in February of 2008 that if TxDOT’s lips were moving they were lying. Senator Judith Zaffirini said at the same hearing “This is an agency in turmoil and chaos.”

Also during this time, TURF sued TxDOT over the US 281 toll project. It was found that TxDOT had rigged the environmental study and conspired to break federal law, resulting in one employee being fired and another being “reassigned.” Both the public’s trust and the legislature’s were irreparably breached.

Status quo will continue dysfunction

This was the backdrop to TxDOT’s Sunset Review process. The Sunset Advisory Commission, tasked with rooting out waste and mismanagement in state agencies, issued two scathing reports recommending the legislature not only abolish the current Transportation Commission (5 appointees of the Governor), but also to place TxDOT under a legislative conservatorship.

Then came a bruising 628-page management audit by Grant Thornton, then the “Restructuring Council.” All recommended sweeping changes to the agency, particularly the leadership (leading to the resignations of the Executive Director and other top posts), and a fundamental shift in the culture of TxDOT.

The Grant Thornton Audit said: “TxDOT has significant leadership issues that impair staff and management effectiveness and morale…Conversations with TxDOTʼs senior leaders reveal a deep-seated belief that TxDOT is doing all the right things and that criticisms leveled against the organization will decline when TxDOT is better able to demonstrate to people how right the organization is.”

The Sunset Advisory Commission report from 2009 states: “Many expressed concerns that TxDOT was ‘out of control,’ advancing its own agenda against objections of both the Legislature and the public. Sunset staff found that this atmosphere of distrust permeated most of TxDOT’s actions and determined that it could not be an effective state transportation agency if trust and confidence were not restored. Significant changes are needed to begin this restoration; tweaking the status quo is simply not enough.”

Yet Perry defied all the recommendations of the Sunset Advisory Commission, the Management Audit, and the Restructure Council and picked a lobbyist and former Perry staffer, Phil Wilson, as the new Executive Director and the commissioner that’s the most like Ric Williamson, Ted Houghton, to be the new Chair of the Commission. At the press conference to announce that Perry had pulled the plug on TTC-35 facing the threat of litigation from two cities in its path, Houghton wisecracked that he was “the most arrogant commissioner of the most arrogant state agency in the history of the state of Texas.”

News coverage of Houghton’s appointment affirms that he sees his primary mission as handing Texas public roads over to private toll operators in sweetheart P3 contracts, despite the years of public opposition, including from within the Republican Party platform and tea parties alike. Status quo for sure, a thumb in the public’s eye most certainly, and it affirms Perry’s determination to continue the Williamson era of division, controversy, and strife in the midst of his struggling presidential campaign with charges of crony capitalism flying. Makes one shake one’s head in stunned amazement.